I watched that clip of him talking about Trump spanking the country like she was a naughty girl and I thought he couldn't possibly get any weirder. Underestimated him again!

WHEN THE GOING GETS WEIRD, THE WEIRD TURN PRO.

I think he's working off the Ben Shapiro playbook where you say stuff designed for the rubes love but also for the libs to love to share with disdain, further raising your profile.

I'm just so annoyed the demon didn't finish the job. Some public-spirited citizen deserves their soul back.

So people don't have to click through to TMZ:

Worth noting ... Tucker admits he was sleeping with 4 dogs in the bed -- so instead of a demon, a sleep-running puppy may have accidentally scratched him. That's one theory online, anyway.

Incubus work is way below my pay grade.

You mock, but has the Prime Minister of Canada ever bothered top say anything about your source of income?

It's worth noting that a sizable portion of the people at the Capitol on January 6th (and who are planning to disrupt state capitols this time) are adherents of the New Apostolic Reformation, which has a very strange belief system based on literal, incessant demon/angel warfare and that politics within "principalities" is just a manifestation/reflection of that struggle. No real separation between earthly politics and spiritual warfare. Many believe there is a literal portal open over the White House, which is why it was important to be there physically because there is a bunch of woo-woo stuff about breaking physical barriers to break spiritual ones and it just gets more hard to follow from there. They aren't exactly "Christian" in the sense most of us understand the term--some of what comes from the pulpits directly contradicts the Bible, even--though they do self-identify as such. Rick Perry and Sarah Palin both belong to NAR churches.

Carlson's story is a very intentional dog whistle.

I got to a regular church and Carlson sounds exactly like the kind of guy I would expect to be beset by demons.

Fresh Air transcript from 2011: The Evangelicals Engaged In Spiritual Warfare

I can't stop myself from reading that in her voice.

Rick Perry and Sarah Palin both belong to NAR churches.

And the current Speaker of the House.

Two or three years ago, it was just another snake cult. Now, they're everywhere.

I'd never heard of the NAR before, and I'm usually pretty tied in to evangelical nonsense. For the most part, it doesn't seem to be a word used by people with those actual beliefs?

At any rate, yes beliefs about literal demons and spiritual warfare are certainly rampant among evangelicals, I mostly blame Frank E. Peretti.

Dic mihi de hoc stupri.

Like basically one researcher wanted a name for this decentralized "movement" of overlapping groups, and chose NAR, which was used by like one small group. Dominionism or Christian Nationalists would be terms I'm more used to hearing. We're talking about protestants here, they're not all joining some group.

I mostly blame Frank E. Peretti.

The tire guy?

I guess it's more specifically pentacostal dominionists?

Lol, some of Wagner's (the guy who actually uses NAR as a term) beliefs are just taken directly from Peretti's novels:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_spirit

Laying it out like 8 sounds wild. But thinking of people who opt out of Halloween because of demons and who seem to more or less believe that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is how science works brings it home again.

It isn't a small group. It was a small group in 2011.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Apostolic_Reformation

It's an umbrella term used by academic researchers to describe a large number of distinct but overlapping individuals, churches, and parachurch groups. It's not a group that people identify as being part of.

> The title New Apostolic Reformation is descriptive of a theological movement and is not an organization and therefore does not have formal membership, though some of the organizations belonging to the movement have a system of membership, and, at times, overlapping leadership. Religion scholar Geir Otto Holmås states that the "NAR is not a denomination or an organization with membership lists and an unambiguous doctrinal foundation, but a loose movement which primarily operates through informal or semi-formal channels," continuing on to say that the movement is spread in bits and pieces: religion scholar Matthew D. Taylor terms this "prophetic memes". Holmås states that "this explains the slightly odd fact that that people who are associated with the NAR do not necessarily identify with the movement. Some of them will not even have heard the term 'New Apostolic Reformation'".

As far as I can tell it's basically used to describe people who are both pentacostal and dominionist? Which, as a former Royal Ranger who attended an Army of God jamboree, it's an overlap I'm well familiar with. It's just not a term used much by non-academics, which is why I just learned it in this thread.

Anyway, I stand by my opinion that if you want to understand the viewpoint in 8, the main thing you need to remember is that all of them read This Present Darkness at a young age and thought it was awesome.

So wait... is this widespread enough that people in right-wing spaces now rant about "Demoncrats" on the regular?

Not a denomination or hierarchy, no. More like antifa, I suppose. But the belief in literal demons actively operating in day-to-day human affairs has spread more widely than is often recognized, and Carlson is talking to those people specifically.

Many of them view Trump as a modern Cyrus, and Trump gave them lots of direct access because flattery.

Yeah, I'm not at all saying it's not real, just that it's pretty normal Christian stuff and has been since at least the 80s. You will for sure catch demons from Ouija boards, and maybe even from Yoga.

The movement apo describes is quite new to me but I don't think it's as out-there compared to the general Christianist culture as implied. The Left Behind novels share a fundamentally Manichean theology (muffled in the text, visible in the plot) that the forces of evil are actually a credible threat to God, even if they will fall. All the Satanic panic reflects a similar mindset, and it didn't go away with a lot of people. Most recently, I just watched a long YouTube essay on a Tiktok genre that's giving warning signs and tips and tricks against evil narcissists, and many of the creators in this genre turn out to be gateways to "there are demons among us".

People forget to clean the mats.

I thought you had to bring your own mat.

It's just not a term used much by non-academics, which is why I just learned it in this thread.

It's the Latinx of medieval bullshittery.

Demonocracy would surely be an improvement, demons being higher in the chain of being than humans.

I am nominally Catholic, but I must not be good at it, because all I can think is that it's just obvious that his dog scratched him in his sleep, and his brain put together a story of why it felt like he was being scratched. Brains try to figure out the world and if they can't they will just make shit up, which is why ChatGPT hallucinates.

I don't yog.

33: how far can you take this? Is the demon version of x better than the human version for all x? How awesome is the demon-performed Goldberg Variations? Show your work

34 He probably thought he was being attacked by a succubus which means his dog scratched him while it was humping him in his sleep just to spell it out.

The feebleness that these twerps attribute to the Big J, in comparison to the demonic horde's ever-lurking, ever-interested, really kind of in love with Tucker if you think about it might, is kind of contemptible as blasphemies go.

Is the demon version of x

Do you mean twitter?

You can take this almost, but not quite, as far as God.

I'm not a huge USA booster in general, I realize, but I think there's a case to be made that we lead the world in contemptible Christian blasphemies. I won't say per capita, but on raw numbers of adherents?

All three of those words are going to be difficult to define.

They're harder to define when you're about 85% unserious, yeah.

5: I was going to say that the name of the demon was probably "seven Long Island Ice Teas" but the dogs are also plausible.

Speaking of cursed, while canvassing I happened to drive by the Flowers in the Attic gift shop.

Family is important.

45: of we lived closer, I would be tempted to patronize them, just for their chutzpah. They even have the domain name!

"We are continually beset by daemons which claw at our flesh and there is a literal portal into a Hell dimension at the official residence of our head of government" - we never, never should have exported a single 40K rulebook to you guys, I'm so sorry, we didn't know you'd react like that

not the first time I've said this but I think it makes more sense to see this as a post-Christian phenomenon, whether in the sense of moving from Christianity to a purely secular authoritarian movement, or in the sense of a schism leading to the emergence of a new religion that is not Christianity at all although it keeps some terminology and symbolism.

I don't think post-Christian. Rather a newish Christian heresy. It sounds like a remix of elements that were in early Christianity and gradually were mostly stamped out.

I agree that it's heresy.

Origen is pretty interesting reading, On First Principles. Later explorations of faith are pretty interesting too-- Albigensian writings especially. I can't wrap my head around Manichean beliefs, which spontaneous deomn wrestling might be aligned with. Tucker personally and contemporary loons who are into this stuff are disappointing-- a persistent question I have is whether past heretics were equally loony and shallow, very hard to tell from existing writings. The best documented is I guess Joan of Arc, who was tried twice.

All of this may be an unwelcome tangent to talking about these weird contemporary Americans (and I guess others, how much Candomble is there really these days?) whose beliefs seem unlikely to in any meaningful way to descend from these old ideas.